Stage Fright

Looking for a movie my wife would never want to see I came across this one on Amazon rime streaming movies. I really knew nothing about it but it seemed that it had a good chance of being entertaining. And it was!!

First there is Minnie Driver but she lasts only through the first couple of scenes as she is starring in a stage play that is a parody of "Phantom", complete with a bad guy wearing a mask. Her twins, a boy and a girl, are about 10 at that time.

Fast forward to 10 years later, the twins are working at a summer musical theater camp as the cooks. But when they decide to do a revival of their mother's fatal musical the daughter just has to try out for the lead, she has to honor her late mother.

It was good to see Meatloaf Aday as the camp director, he even has a couple of musical numbers. Man he was talented. But the biggest problem I had, even though this is a spoof movie, the young actress is not a particularly good singer. Pleasant, maybe, but nowhere near what would be required to do a Broadway role, which was the character's stated goal.

I enjoyed the movie, it has lots of gore and blood, in the spirit of a parody, but as something completely different I enjoyed it.

A snobby musical theater camp is terrorized by a blood-thirsty killer who hates musical theater.

The film has plenty of nice references early on to "Phantom of the Opera" and "Fantomas", with the "Phantom" theme throughout. Some have said the film draws from Argento's "Opera", but that is not necessarily the case. Beyond the generally theme (which is "Phantom"), there was very little "Opera".

The supporting cast is solid, with the amazing Meat Loaf and even a brief but powerful performance from Minnie Driver. Allie MacDonald as the lead is amazing, and do not be surprised if she gets big really fast after this.

The film widely received negative reviews, and the reasons are clear. The blend of humor, music and horror is not always flawless, and some of the songs are definitely better than others. Some probably enjoyed the heavy metal parts and disliked the rest (or vice versa). This is not on the same level as "Repo: The Genetic Opera", for example.

Nothing is more important than musical theater, not even murder.

Camilla Swanson and her brother Buddy work at Center Stage, a summer camp for musical theater ingenues run by their guardian Ron McCall. This year the camp's final show will be The Haunting of the Opera, the musical their mother was the lead actress in when she was brutally murdered. Camilla wishes to be like her mother but auditions are cutthroat, literally, and there is a kabuki masked madmen with a murderous disdain for Broadway belting.

Stage Fright is a film set in a summer camp that can only be described as campy. It is ridiculous and funny, self-awaredly mocking all the musical theater stereotypes. Everyone sings Sondheim-esque tunes, even the killer, but his musical styling is about as far from the brassy Broadway musical theater genre as it can get.

With any hybrid genre film, one is typically more dominant than the other. Stage Fright is both horror and musical though forty minutes pass by where it is straight musical movie before any real carnage occurs. Luckily writer/director Jerome Sable keeps Stage Fright light and amusing.

Stage Fright makes you endure Glee-like show-tunes in order to get to the bloody massacre of these theater camp adolescents. The deaths in the film are not nearly as campy as the first half of the film, unfortunately, and I wanted them to be a bit more far-fetched and ridiculous. Stage Fright fulfills the niche market for musical theater horror.

Audiences will leave with the knowledge that it's not wrong to sing and dance when someone just died, the show must go on and nothing is more important than The Theatre.

Fin more reviews in FULL at our website!

I can appreciate what they're trying to do here, namely, something a little different. One of the reasons I give M. Night Shyamalan more grace than most film fans is because of his willingness to take risks doing something unique. However, like several of Shyamalan's own films, this movie ends up just being a little silly, lacking heart.

I liked that it reminded to those good old horror movies from the 90's and giving that kind of vibe. But also, the addition of the musical element wasn't bad because it made more fun. However, I still felt like they could've played more with the whole theater/play situation instead of shying away with crowd-full musicals. The deaths were good, and had some very real makeup effects, but as they prefer eased with the story, they kept getting tamer and less over the top. Overall the acting was good, and even though the story and the whole killer reveal wasn't very impressive, it still managed to involve me into the movie and just enjoy it. And finally, I liked how the ending evoked many other horror movies with the mirror scene, by giving it that sense of suspense and horror without feeling too cliché.